FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes • Hacker News Board

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#331

Post by justsomeuser » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

I think it's fine to be honest.

Over time competition between the 3 major clouds combined with hardware getting cheaper will mean there is not going to be a massive jump in prices, if any at all.

It is not impossible to design relatively cloud-portable server software.

Also I think FedEx, and companies in general, would prefer to increase revenue rather than reduce costs (by running their own data center) in order to increase their net profit.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#332

Post by lulzury » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 4:58 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #153

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #136

I've seen two mainframe "replacements" fail to either retire the mainframe, OR produce an alternative system which people like. Has any Fortune 500 company successfully "retired" their mainframe?

I've seen it. It was essentially four steps: - Build middleware (REST API endpoint) in front of the mainframe that was 1:1 mainframe functions. It initially does nothing except auth and routing. - Re-write/migrate all other software from using the mainframe directly to using the new middleware. - Work to further restrict anything directly connecting to the mainframe aside from the middleware, including staff's termin…

There's so much wisdom in this comment. This is also how you tackle and replace very large legacy systems correctly.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#333

Post by ryanmarsh » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:02 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

empowered to charge them whatever price they want

That's correct assuming monopolistic behavior. I believe pricing in information infra will be a race to the bottom. We've not seen a lack of competition in this space.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#334

Post by ihaveajob » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:03 PM UTC

oogali wrote: post #313

misterprime wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every state charges their own fee per mile to commercial trucks. Filing taxes as a long distance trucking company that operates in multiple states is pretty annoying. There's also tax built in to every gallon of fuel. There are also flat annual registration fees you have to pay as well.

Don’t forget the tolls for various highways, bridges, and tunnels as they’re almost always priced higher for vehicles with more than two axles.

Side point here, but that's a very justifiable cost. The damaged to a road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight [1]. That's something that amuses me when drivers complain that bike riders don't pay a "road tax". If they did, it would be a laughably low amount compared to what a car driver would have to pay in proportion.

[1] https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-...

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#335

Post by tpm » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:04 PM UTC

nightpool wrote: post #307

citizenpaul wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pays 0 $/km for the roads, That is really not true at least in the USA. There are all kinds of taxes and fees for using the roads with large trucks. Have you ever seen the weigh stations on the sides of the highway in the US? Those are there to fine the trucks for what they are carrying if it is beyond what is allowed among other things. You said km though so you probably are not in the US.

It's not true in the EU either, plenty of countries have truck and trailer specific tolls. The average truck on the German autobahn, for example, pays €0.15 per kilometre.

More or less all EU members should charge freight road transport fees on highways and sometimes other roads too.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#336

Post by draw_down » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:06 PM UTC

marcosdumay wrote: post #328

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

> Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? As long as they have backups, yep, that's a quite possible alternative. And backups cost very little, and don't need to run flawlessly 24x7. They will probably pay through their nose either way (backups or not, migrating or not), because that's how the cloud works. But well, that's for their bean-counters to count. As l…

Probably for the same reason nobody goes around talking about the BATNA of having employees. This doesn’t make any sense.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#337

Post by marcosdumay » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:08 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #244

pid-1 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a common take on HN - cloud is too expensive. I'm curious whether the folks claiming that have any data center ops experience. Because, personally, I'd rather retire than deal with Dell, HP, Cisco, fibers, cooling issues, physical security, hardware failling... And that's just the hardware. Then you still need to pay VMWare for a decent virtualization platform, monitoring tools, etc.... Seriously, no…

If you don't enjoy it then what were you doing working at a datacenter? I enjoyed server admin, "back in the day", when your servers were pets and not cattle. But of course we have to make tech just as expendable as our workers, business school demands it! What if your pet server gets hit by a digital bus?!

Pet server classes is a much nicer concept anyway. I never liked the instance based personalization. Creating a machine, defining its class, and seeing it become a machine of its class is magical.

Of course, the newest idea is for creating and destroying machines automatically... that outside of the could is quite pointless but people want it anyway. I imagine seeing all that orchestration working must be even nicer than a machine autoconfiguring, but I am yet to see a place where it just works.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#338

Post by lupire » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC

dehrmann wrote: post #317

fires10 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally can not go from city water/sewage to on-prem for legal reasons. However, many are going on-prem with solar. I am going almost completely off-grid for cost and SLA requirements.

What's interesting is people seem really excited about installing rooftop solar, but I see fewer companies building collectors in places with cheap land and ample sun. That tells me part of the selling point of rooftop solar is it feels good, and the economics might not actually work.

Captured Solar (electricity in general) doesn't travel well over long distances.

Generating solar for local use saves the cost of transport.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#339

Post by lupire » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

noobermin wrote: post #47

cs702 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a doubt, a future generation of executives will revisit and reverse the decision to rent all information infrastructure, but that will likely be many, many years down the road. In the meantime, the current generation of executives who made this decision will look very smart for saving the company lots of money for a good number of years. And they stand to benefit personally from it. They're doing the rational…

It's amazing there are no other voices in the room pushing back against this. It really makes you wonder how companies even function at all, much less make money. Being so short sided never ends well.

No post body was provided.

Re: FedEx to close data centers, retire mainframes

#340

Post by avereveard » Tue, Jul 05, 2022, 5:11 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #19

Ultimately companies that abdicate their informatics operations like this will give their profits to their data-center operators, who will be empowered to charge them whatever price they want. Because what's their BATNA? Migrating from Azure to AWS when Microsoft doesn't want to let them? Renting your information infrastructure is a great way to reduce startup costs, but down the road, that information infrastructure…

Eh as long as one design for portability migrating isn't that hard, which enables them to leverage their own size for volume discounts

As long as they stick to services that have overlap been providers (postgres, mongodb, nfs/cifs, etc) or transformers (s3, azure blob storage) and package their code in somewhat agnostic format (docker images, wars, what have you) they'll be fine.